The Chris Moeller Archives

New life

Last night, Albert Pujols slugged a two-out, three-run, ninth-inning, season-rescuing, stadium demolition-delaying, 450-plus foot home run over Minute Maid Park's left-field wall. The ball also cleared the so-called "Crawford Boxes," the facade that rises above those seats, the train tracks that run across the top of the facade, and finally off one of the glass windows designed to keep the NASA launch facility in Houston safe from such errant Pujols blasts. In addition to helping the Cardinals avoid their first-- and last-- four game losing streak of the season, it made Pujols' team the first in 13 years to win a post-season elimination game after being down to their final strike. It has linked Pujols' name with the likes of Thomson, Mazeroski, Gibson, Carter, and Henderson, where it had already been linked with Musial, Gehrig, and DiMaggio. Ten hours before the home run was launched, I quit my job.


I walked in the door of WHO Radio and then-Palmer Communications in 1996. My tenure, upon the exit in two weeks, will have lasted nearly precisely the duration of Matt Morris' St. Louis Cardinals career, provided the 31-year-old right-handed pitcher departs the Cardinals as a free agent this winter, as expected. The details of my departure are exhaustive, but sufficed to say, the dispute that arose between labor and management is one as old as the hills-- the balancing of duties, performance, recognition, and respect against financial compensation.

My negotiation skills, in truth, probably lacked finesse on this day; my demands lacked flexibility. Four times over two conferences, a superior incorporated the expression, "I feel like I have a gun to my head." This was a metaphor that I resented for its violent tone and for its implication of criminal pursuit, but one that I found strangely self-affirming as well. The "St. Louis Swifties," the Cards' championship clubs of the 1940s, would have referred to this type of dialogue, or the like, as "Country Hardball." It was a bitterly-fought battle of offers and counter-offers-- or lack thereof; a volley of both negotiating ploys and semantics. One man's "hands being tied," after all, is just another man's "failure to show respect." One man's 30 percent "raise" is another man's "already-six-year-withheld cost-of-living wage increase." One man's "2005 overriding company expense," i.e., a brand new building to house five radio stations, is another man's "The House My Bonus Built."

The success of my negotiating strategy remains in doubt, as I enter autumn with few financial alternatives in which to counter lost paychecks, short of offering up my body for sport along Des Moines' 6th Avenue. My chin remains high, however, for when the story of October 17th, 2005 is finally told, and your faithful blogger is judged either a pauper or a king, no one will be able to claim he hung a slider on that fateful afternoon. "Lights Out" Moeller was pumping fastballs.

posted by CM @ 10:28 PM